$132/barrel and rising. Who's behind it.

[smockers83]

Hashiriya, maybe you misunderstood what I was trying to get at, or maybe I just didn't explain myself enough, because I completely agree with you. What I was trying to get at is that in our current situation, each event that deems speculation to be involved seems to pile up on one another. Say something happens in Nigeria one month. then we speculate because Iran says something a month later. I feel that the speculation due to the Nigeria event never really ends and the price is further bidded up due to Amadinejad threatening someone or something. The only time we see oil fall and hear the reasons these days is a rise in the dollar or surprises that the supply has increased. But yes, this bubble will pop eventually.

Eikon, I agree that speculation isn't the root cause in high prices, it is supply/demand that is at the bottom of this. But me just guessing and throwing a number out there, I bet if we were able to take speculation out, we'd see a 20% drop in crude.

[HashiriyaS14]

Good thread you guys!

I agree that the speculation of traders has artificially increased prices on oil. But they are not the end cause of the rise in gas prices. They are simply ahead of the curve a bit.

As China, India, and other developing countries continue to boom, the worldwide demand for gas will continue to mushroom.

I think one of the biggest factors right now is the diminishing return of the US dollar. Oil is traded in US $$$, and the devaluation of that dollar has a direct correlation to the price of crude oil.

^^Yeah, obviously the traders are bidding up prices BECAUSE of all this stuff.

Ultimately, 100% of actual price increases are attributable to speculators as 100% of foreign-consumed oil is purchased on world wholesale futures markets.

It's just that you're pinpointing WHY the speculators are bidding up prices, and it's of course due to stuff like perceived constraints on supply, governmental instability, rising demand in Asia, et cetera.

All these things convince speculators that the fair price of oil ought to be higher because all these factors will make it more difficult to procure in sufficient quantities to meet demand, and thus the speculators are willing to pay increasingly more for the futures as they believe that they will be able to pawn them off on actual oil consumers for even more when prices rise as they believe they will.

[audtatious]

Methane will be available forever at almost no cost. We simply lack infrastructure to support it's use. Just my .02 to add on to your already awsome idea's Hash...lol.

Don't expect methane to ever be adopted as a automotive direction due to the chance at "spills". Methane as a gas is far worse than CO2 so using it as a solution will be blocked.

The environmentalists were able to blacklist offshore drilling after some spills in the late 60's. Of course, since that time, technology has caught up to the point that spills are pretty much a thing in the past (Katrina proved that). They were _almost_ able to use their doom-n-gloom to stop the alaska pipeline based on environmental effects on caribou (tho they have egg on their face because the pipeline actually helped increase the heards). They were able to end building nuke plants, building additional refineries, etc. etc. etc. They have a huge lobby and are powerful enough to impact everything from national resources to building golf courses. They actually are impacting building clean-coal plants as well due to legal issues, thus we have to keep using dirty-coal burning plants due to the issues faced with building a replacement.

So, we are screwed and limited while countries like China are building oil platforms 60 miles off the coast of Florida and doing exploration in the gulf.